In a certain French tradition – at least since the nineteenth century, when research became increasingly institutionalised and professionalised – technology has suffered from an image deficit. This tradition is based on a deep dichotomy between “open” research and “captive” research, between science, seen as disinterested and universal, and its “applications”, seen as “impure” due to their links with the market and the state.

This situation probably reflects a kind of implicit hierarchy that locates technological knowledge in a position of dependency on the majesty of science. Technology has negative connotations in the public imagination because of the huge negative power attributed to it. It is common in France to warn of the risk of “pure” knowledge being absorbed in the parasitical complex of technological knowledge, and of “pure” science being absorbed in the formless, similarly parasitical complex of “techno-science”.

Through the French Académie des Sciences’ own words, we aim to show that the two world wars, with the patriotic and political mobilisation they caused, played a decisive role in the evolution of scientists’ views on the issue of how their research was used, with the myth of “pure science” but also of “scientists working in industry and helping to introduce scientific methods to industry”. A grassroots movement began in 1916, culminating in 2000 with the creation of the Académie des Technologies. The moment we wish to emphasise came between the wars. The economic crisis reactivated the dichotomy between science and its applications. The Académie denounced “the several distinguished minds who cast doubt on the hitherto unquestioned human importance of Science and its applications” by blaming it for the unemployment and poverty due to the progress of mechanisation. But as soon as the Nazi threat became clearer, the great figures of science (such as Jean Perrin and Joliot-Curie) accepted the process of mobilising science. The power of technological knowledge regained its legitimacy.

It is both this cultural polarisation between the scientist and the inventor, which crystallised in the mid-1930s, and the process by which it was overcome (resulting in the foundation of the Centre national de la recherche française in 1939) that we wish to analyse. The work is based primarily on the reports of the Académie’s “secret committee” and on the published reports.